A+Beginner+Guide+to+Science+Fiction

Many people, myself included, often turn their nose up or scurry away in fear when the topic of science-fiction literature is brought up. However, despite the preconceptions that people may have about science fiction, science fiction is a vast genre of literature that has many things to offer to the people who read it; from romance to mystery science fiction can offer it all.

Science Fiction can be a very difficult genre of literature to define as it often contains overlapping elements of other genres, most often fantasy. Science fiction is, though, a genre of its own. In //The Readers' Advisory Guide to Genre Fiction//, Joyce Saricks defines science fiction as positing, "worlds and technologies that could exist. Science, rather than magic, drives these speculative tales, and the science must be accurate and true to key axioms of Newtonian and relative physics."
 * Getting Started--What is Science Fiction?**

In case the throwing about of words like Newtonian has turned you off science fiction already Orson Scott Card, a popular science fiction and fantasy author, has a different way to distinguish between the two genres. He says that if the cover art contains trees the book is fantasy, if it contains rivets then it is science fiction.

[|Where to Start with Young Adult Science Fiction]

//Android -// A biological robot, especially a cloned or synthetic human.
 * Brief Glossary of Science Fiction Words and Phrases**

//Blaster// - A general science fiction term for a pistol like hand weapon that fires an unspecified form of radiant energy.

//Cyberspace// - The totality of all the world's networked computers, represented as a visual virtual 3D domain in which a user may move and act with consequences in the real world. Now widely known (and widely abused) in the mainstream; today's Internet does not yet have the most salient characteristics of cyberspace.

//Cyborg// - A general science fiction term for a technological melding of human and machine, with the machine parts intended to enhance normal human abilities and environmental tolerances.

//Flitter// - A general science fiction term used for a personal flying vehicle, usually wingless, that uses some form of sophisticated anti-gravitational technology to fly.

//Faster than Light (FTL)// - General science fiction term for a hypothetical means of circumventing the Einsteinian speed limit, these being necessary to a large class of SF plots that require easy travel between star systems.

//Sentient// - A general science fiction term for an extraterrestrial possessing human-level intelligence.

//Tractor Beam// - A general science fiction term referring to technology that can pull on material objects at a distance ranging from feet to miles.

Learn even more science fiction [|words and phrases].

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